have not done
that yet; you have only explained past history, and have had a good word
for everybody.'

'Then, Sir,' I quickly answered, 'I pitch into you, and into your
Governments, one after another, for not mastering the facts of South
African life. Why do you now refuse to protect your own highway into the
Interior, and at the same time conserve the work of the missionaries
whom you have supported for two generations, and thus put an end to the
freebooting of the Boers, and of our own people who joined them? At
present there is a disarmed coloured population, disarmed by your own
laws on account only of their colour; and there is an armed population,
armed under your laws, because they are white; and you decline to
interfere in any way for the protection of the former. You will neither
protect the natives nor give them fair play and an open field, so that
they may protect themselves.'

'Now, my dear,' said the little wife, 'I wonder who deserves to be
hanged now? I am sure we are obliged to Mr. Mackenzie for giving us a
clear view of things.'

'No, no, you are always too hasty,' said my host, quite gravely. 'The
thing gets very serious. Do I rightly understand you, Mr. Mackenzie,
that practically we Englishmen arm those freebooters (from the
Transvaal,) and practically keep the blacks disarmed, and that when the
blacks have called on us for protection and have offered themselves and
their country to the Queen we have paid no heed? Is this true?'

'Every word true,' I replied.

'Then may I ask, did you not fight for these people? You had surely got
a rifle,' said my host, turning right round on me.

'My dear, you forget Mr. Mackenzie has been a Missionary,' said his
wife. 'You yourself, as a Director of the London Missionary Society,
would have had him cashiered if he had done anything of the kind.'

'Nonsense, you don't see the thing. I assure you I could not have
endured such meanness and injustice. I should have broken such
confounded laws. I should have shouldered a rifle, I know,' said the
indignant man as he paced his room.

'My dear, you would have got shot, you know,' said his wife.

'Shot! yes, certainty, why not?' said my host; and added gravely, 'A
fellow would know _why_ he was shot. Is it true, Mr. Mackenzie, that
those blacks were kind to our people who fled to them from the
Transvaal, and that they there protected them?'

'Quite true,' I rejoined.

'Then by heaven,' said Mr.----, raising his voice--

'Let us go to supper,' broke in the gentle wife, 'you are only wearying
Mr. Mackenzie by your constant wishes to hang some one.'

"I trust my friends will forgive me for recalling this conversation,
which vividly pictures the state of people's mind concerning South
Africa in 1882. I found that most people were incredulous as to the
facts being known at the Colonial Office, and there was a uniform
persuasion that Mr. Gladstone was ignorant that such things were going
on."

I have given these interviews (much abridged) because they illustrate in
a rather humourous way a state of mind which unhappily has long existed
and exists to some degree to this day in England--an impatience of
responsibility for anything concerning interests lying beyond the shores
of our own Island, a certain superciliousness, and a habit of expressing
and adhering to suddenly formed and violent opinions without sufficient
study of the matters in question,--such opinions being often influenced
by the bias of party politics. Our countrymen are now waking up to a
graver and deeper consideration of the tremendous interests at stake in
our Colonies and Dependencies, and to a greater readiness to accept
responsibilities which once undertaken it is cowardice to reject or even
to complain of.

At the request of the London Missionary Society, Mr. Mackenzie drew up
an extended account of the Bechuanaland question, which had a wide
circulation. He did not enter into party politics,